Beyond growth: new alliances for socio-ecological transformation in Austria

ABSTRACT

Trade unions and environmental movements are often seen as political opponents most prominently discussed in the form of the ‘jobs vs. environment dilemma’. Based on historical examples of the conflict relations between trade unions and environmental groups in the Austrian energy sector, this paper showcases how the relationship between the two groups has changed from enmity to first attempts at alliance building. Drawing from analysis of union documents and problem-centred interviews conducted with Austrian unionists, it shows that newly emerging alliances between unions and environmental movements contain the seeds for a broad societal movement that can help overcome the paradigm of growth and actively engage in the creation of policies that support a social–ecological transformation.     

Organizational interventions and the creation of gendered knowledge: US universities and NSF ADVANCE

Universities are sites of both elite knowledge production and reproduction of intersecting gendered inequalities. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) ‘Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers’ (ADVANCE) programme uses universities’ role as self‐reflective knowledge producers to design changes promoting gender equality. This knowledge is shaped by the institutional context of its production: NSF as a funder of scientific research; US universities as participants in highly competitive markets; managerialism as a condition of modern higher education systems; and separation of basic from applied research in the hierarchy of science. The tensions and underlying power dimensions of these contexts reveal local challenges that ADVANCE interventions navigate and the broader politics shaping what and how ADVANCE discovers. Yet, as a learning‐oriented intervention, ADVANCE changes over time to create and incorporate more gendered knowledge about inequalities, to legitimize feminist understandings of organizations, and to challenge the division between fundamental and applied knowledge.     

Foster Parents as a Critical Link and Resource in International Adoptions From Guatemala

Before the recent implementation of the Hague Convention requirements on intercountry adoption in Guatemala, most children in the process of being adopted by foreign nationals were cared for by foster parents. In the present study, 16 Guatemalan foster parents were interviewed regarding their experiences with and attitudes toward international and domestic adoption and fostering. Although adoption was generally described in positive terms as a means to improve the child's future, respondents also emphasized the economic dimension of international adoption. Foster parents’ views implied actions that are important for implementation of the Hague Convention requirements, including addressing poverty as the root cause of child relinquishment, reducing structural and attitudinal barriers to domestic adoption, and enlisting the aid of extended families in caring for children. With training and licensing, foster parents themselves might play a role in post-Hague procedures for providing families for children.     

Explaining the heterogeneity of the leadership-innovation relationship: Ambidextrous leadership

The authors review and meta-analytically integrate the existing literature on leadership and innovation to show a complex and inconsistent picture of this relationship. Current research has mostly neglected the complex nature of innovation processes that leads to changing requirements within these processes. The main requirements of innovation are exploration and exploitation as well as a flexibility to switch between those two activities. The authors propose an ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation that specifies two complementary sets of leadership behavior that foster exploration and exploitation in individuals and teams — opening and closing leader behaviors, respectively. We call this ambidextrous leadership because it utilizes opening and closing leader behaviors and switches between them to deal with the ever-changing requirements of the innovation process. Routes to ambidextrous leadership and opportunities for future research on leadership and innovation are discussed.